Modeling the reliability of the onboard equipment of a mobile robot

Abstract

Mobile robots with complex onboard equipment are investigated in this article. It is shown that their onboard equipment, for providing the required reliability parameters, must have fault-tolerant properties. For designing such equipment it is necessary to have an adequate model of reliability parameters evaluation. The approach, linked to the creation of the model, based on parallel semi-Markov process apparatus, is considered. At the first stage of modeling, the lifetime of the single block in a complex fault-recovery cycle is determined. Dependences for the calculation of time intervals and probabilities of wandering through ordinary semi-Markov processes for a common case are obtained. At the second stage, ordinary processes are included in the parallel one, which simulates the lifetime of the equipment lifetime as a whole. To simplify calculations, a digital model of faults with the use of the procedure of histogram sampling is proposed.  It is shown that the number of samples permits to control both the accuracy and the computational complexity of  the procedure for calculating the reliability parameters.

Keywords

• reliability
• failure
• fault-tolerance
• semi-markov process
• sampling
• modeling
• accuracy
• computational complexity